National Association for Voluntary and Community Action
What is RSS all about?
Paul Webster, NAVCA – Regional ICT Support and
Development Officer, explains how RSS and other social media
tools can make your organisation become more effective.
We all like to keep up with
current news and find out
about events that interest us.
For some it may be catching
the headlines of the 10 o’clock
news, others the back page of The Metro, or for
others reading the celebrity gossip magazines.
But what about keeping up with information on
the Internet related to our work? There are
changes in government policy to keep up to date
with, useful conferences to attend and general
news from other organisations in the sector
similar to ourselves that we really should know
about. How is it possible to know about all this
information … and still be efficient at doing our
job! RSS is one way of helping in this process.
Really Simple …
There are a number of definitions for what RSS
stands for, the most popular being Really Simple
Syndication, or in other words a really
straightforward way for you to have access to the
latest updates and new content that many
websites make available on the Internet.
RSS is really useful as it removes the need for
you to constantly re-visit each of the websites
that you are interested in to check for news and
updates. Instead, if you see that the website (or
your browser toolbar) has the RSS icon showing
(often denoted with the orange coloured symbol
shown above), it means the website publishes an
www.navca.org.uk
Information
RSS feed. You then just need to click on that
logo to add it to the collection of websites you
want to keep up to date with. You will need a
Feed Reader (sometimes called News Reader)
program which arranges your selection of
websites, but these are free to obtain and use.
Probably the easiest one to get started with is
‘Reader’ which is built into the Google web
browser (just open up www.google.co.uk and
click on ‘Reader’ – which is part of the ‘more’
menu list – to set up a free account).
Spreading your news
It is also possible for your own website to send
out an RSS feed containing your organisation’s
latest news stories and updates. This is a little
trickier to set up – however if you talk to the
people who provide or host your organisation’s
website they should be able to add RSS and
show you how new content will be picked up by
the feed.
RSS is part of the family of web 2.0 internet
resources. Web 2.0 is simply a marketing term
for the many new ways it is possible to use the
internet in an interactive and collaborative way.
Rather than traditional websites that were very
‘top-down’, just presenting pages of static
information for you to read, the new web
positively encourages these social media
conversations to take place, giving you more
chance to participate and to shape content and
discussions. For example, websites (such as
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blogs) open up the comment function enabling
you to give feedback to the author about their
work; a wiki is a great web tool that enables
collaborative working on a document a wiki that
removes the need to email copies to each other.
To share audio, photos or videos of your
successful projects with similar schemes,
trustees or funding bodies, a podcast or
YouTube (for videos) or Flickr (for photos) are
very practical resources.
Useful RSS Feeds
There are some useful RSS feeds that you may
like to follow to get you started …
• NAVCA is developing RSS feeds. Currently
we have set up a general NAVCA news feed
and specialist feeds for our Local
Commissioning and Procurement Unit and
our Improving Local Partnerships Unit. Visit:
www.navca.org.uk/rss
• ThirdSector Magazine has a ‘breaking news’
at www.thirdsector.co.uk (The RSS logo is
in the middle of the page)
• The Guardian RSS updates can be saved by
clicking on ‘webfeed’ on the right hand side of
the main page – www.guardian.co.uk
For a list of some local infrastructure
organisations we know are using RSS feeds (and
other types of social media tools) see the map
on: http://watfordgap.wordpress.com – the
organisations using RSS are marked with an
orange coloured pin. If you want to keep up to
date with additions to this page then you can
subscribe at the ‘Entries RSS’ button. Some
good examples of LIOs using RSS that we have
found are:
www.navca.org.uk
Information
• Voluntary Action Leicester
www.voluntaryactionleicester.org.uk have
an RSS feeds of latest news (the RSS feed
button will appear in your toolbar or address
window)
• South Hams CVS
www.southhamscvs.org.uk/south-hams-
cvs.html provide a way to keep up to date
with their latest news from the ‘subscribe to
RSS’ button on the right hand side of the
page.
• Voluntary Action Manchester
www.vamanchester.org.uk (the RSS button
is right down at the bottom of the page). On
the ‘resources’ page they also have examples
of how they are using YouTube, Flickr, Twitter
and Facebook.
Hopefully this article has provided some ideas of
how RSS and other social media tools could be
used to both make your organisation more
efficient in gathering information, but also more
effective in reaching out to other groups.
The Lasa ICT Knowledgebase article
www.ictknowledgebase.org.uk/whatisrss
contains more in depth information about RSS.
There is also a free booklet produced by The
Media Trust which covers a range of social
media ideas which can be obtained from the ICT
Champion in your region: full details are at
www.navca.org.uk/services/ictsupport
Paul Webster
NAVCA Regional ICT Support and
Development
Tel 0114 289 3977
Email paul.webster@navca.org.uk
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